How to Do a One-Handed Fan Card Flourish

Learn how to do a one-handed fan from magician Michael Patrick in this Howcast card flourish tutorial.

Transcript

Hi. I'm Mike Patrick, and this is how to do the one-handed fan. It looks like this. Your alternative is to do it in both hands, and you can make an S fan and close it like this. This is how to do it. You should hold it in. . .you're going to use your pinky and your index finger, and you put it right into this kind of grip. So this should be not a death grip, but you should be able to hold this securely like this without letting go.

You're not actually going to hold them entirely like this during the course of the fan. You're going to place your thumb on the bottom edge right around here, and you're going to sort of let go. And when you do this, you're going to push with your thumb and pull with your other fingers. This is difficult to do with an entire deck and make it look even. Usually, this type of fan is performed with half the deck like this.

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And you get a very even spread. So again, the basic mechanics are you hold them in this position, and you place your thumb on the actual border of the cards underneath, stretching way down. Let go. And you're going to pull with these fingers downward, and you're going to push with your thumb this direction, in a sort of smearing action. I've heard someone call this a smear fan once, and it's sort of for good reason, because you do this. This will take a little bit of time to get looking good. But when you do, you can do this, and you close. And it looks very fancy. You can minimize when you're dividing the deck into two hands. You simply riffle the cards like this.

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Allow them to swivel up so that your other hand can grip in a mirror action. And then you spread both of them like this. And you can make the S, and then just reverse the action to close them back into a dealing position. I'm Mike Patrick, and that's how to do a one-handed fan.